Live From New York Part 2

CHEVY CHASE:.

John was wonderful. He was trouble later on for me. Jesus, oh G.o.d, was he trouble.

GARRETT MORRIS, Cast Member: I'd been a licensed schoolteacher, taught two years at PS 71 in New York plus five years at the projects with drug-addicted kids. And you know what, I hadn't worked in like a f.u.c.king year and a half. I'd done Cooley High and that was it. I left the school system to go back into a thing called Hallelujah Baby. My license had even expired.

I didn't have a job. I was starving. So Lorne offered me a job. I won't tell you how much it was, but it was good money.

LARAINE NEWMAN, Cast Member: I worked for Lorne the first time on a Lily Tomlin special. He had come to see me when we had just formed the Groundlings and we had our theater over on Oxford and Santa Monica. It was just the armpit of Hollywood, and he came to see the show. I was doing my characters and my monologues. They really were looking for men for the Lily Tomlin special, they didn't need any more women. But they ended up hiring me. And that was just thrilling. I was twenty-two.

The following year, Lorne told me he had been approached to do a weekend replacement show for The Tonight Show and said it would be a cross between Monty Python and 60 Minutes. And I thought, "I'd watch that," you know. It was a big break and I thought, "This'll be great."

JANE CURTIN, Cast Member: John and I were the last two people hired, and John was hired about a week after me, so I didn't have any idea of what was going on there. But I knew John, because John and I were also auditioning for the Howard Cosell show. So I was working with John in those auditions too. He was much sweeter back then, I think, because he couldn't afford the drugs. He was more in control. He was accessible. I actually liked him when we were working on the Cosell show auditions. I thought he was a lot of fun, and I thought he was very talented. And then when he got hired by Sat.u.r.day Night, I thought it was a very good idea.

LORNE MICHAELS:.

Gilda and John and Danny had known each other from before. Danny and I had known each other because when I came down, I brought him down from Canada. Gilda and I went back forever. And so you had Laraine, who I brought from L.A., Jane Curtin, who we kind of heard about, and the girl we were going to choose, this girl named Mimi Kennedy. But Gilda was worried that they were too similar.

GARRETT MORRIS:.

The way I got on the show as an actor is that a couple people on the writing staff were trying to get rid of me as a writer. Mind you, I had two plays that had been produced in New York City. In fact, New York commissioned a play from your boy, okay, and then I wrote another play, which was produced in New York and in L.A. I'm a playwright, so I was having trouble getting my stuff down to a minute or a minute and a half, to fit into some sketch.

The first three months or so, a guy there stole an idea and then added a little something to it, and he didn't even give me credit for cowriting. This guy stole from me and then told Lorne I couldn't write. Lorne's response was even-tempered. He wasn't necessarily stroking me like I was a pet, but he was fair. When the challenge came to get rid of me as a writer, Lorne let me audition for the Not Ready for Prime Time Players. He did not fire me. And to this day, I am thankful for that. So I got with the Not Ready for Prime Time Players, and the look on that guy's face for the next four years was the only thing that saved me from jumping on him.

BERNIE BRILLSTEIN:.

Lorne really stuck to his guns at the very beginning. He told the network, "I must have seventeen shows. Give the show time to grow." They thought we were insane. And maybe we were. But it wasn't until the tenth show that they really hit their stride. Lorne was this great young writer who had this vision of this type of show. He was also a good producer, but everybody forgets what a great writer he was, and certainly a great editor. He was like a conduit for all the comedy brains at the time. He was just "The Guy."

JOHN LANDIS, Film Director: This is all hindsight, okay? I don't want to take anything away from Lorne, but he was in the right place at the right time. There were comedy movements going on everywhere. In England you had the Pythons, in San Francisco you had the Committee, in Chicago you had Second City, and then in New York - starting in Boston but then moving to New York - you had the National Lampoon Show. If you look at Sat.u.r.day Night Live's cast for the first three or four years, you'll see they were all either Lampoon or Second City. He cherry-picked people of great skill and talent that had been trained and gotten their chops.

BARBARA GALLAGHER, a.s.sociate Producer: Lorne was very shy, very funny, kind of quiet. We were exactly the same age. He called me and said that d.i.c.k Ebersol and he were going to do a show. It sounded like a "Look, we've got a barn, we're going to put on a show" kind of thing. And because I'd had live TV experience by working on the Ed Sullivan Show, Lorne wanted me to come and write and be part of the team. I didn't want to go back to New York, and I didn't want to be a writer, so Lorne said, "How about 'creative a.s.sociate producer'? I just like the fact you've been on a live show." So I said okay. I went back to New York in June of 1975.

I didn't have a clue what the show was going to be. It just sounded fun and kind of groundbreaking.

EUGENE LEE, Set Designer: I can remember Lorne - he would not remember - saying to me, "G.o.d, this is going to be so great! We all get to just hang out in New York together." I was living on a sailboat in Rhode Island, working with what was then called the Trinity Square Repertory Company - where I still work - and someone called my boat about this Canadian producer doing a comedy-variety show. They wanted to know if we - my wife, Franne, a costume designer, and I - would be interested in talking. He was at the Plaza, we could call and make an appointment. Well, why not?

Franne and I both came in to see Lorne. We brought along, as designers do, a few things to show him what we did. He didn't seem that interested. I don't think he ever looked at any of them.

ALAN ZWEIBEL, Writer: In 1975 I'm this Jewish guy slicing G.o.d-knows-what at a deli in Queens and selling jokes to these Catskill comics for seven dollars a joke. At night I would go on at Catch a Rising Star. I had taken all the jokes that the Borscht Belt comedians wouldn't buy from me because they said the stuff was too risque for their crowd and made them into a stand-up act for myself, hoping that somebody would come in, like the material, and give me a job in television.

Everybody hung out at Catch a Rising Star and the Improv in those days. And I'd just met Billy Crystal, who was starting out the same way. He lived on Long Island, three towns over from where I was living with my parents; he was married and had a kid already. We would carpool into the city every night. One night about four months into this horror show, it's about one in the morning and I'm having trouble making these six drunks from Des Moines laugh, and I get off the stage sweating like a pig and I go over to the bar, and I'm waiting for Billy to tell his jokes so he can drive me home to Long Island. And this guy sits down next to me and just stares at me. Stares at me. And I look over - "What?" And he just looks at me and he goes, "You know, you're the worst comedian I've ever seen in my life." And I went, "Yeah, I know."

I said that I wanted to have a wife and kids someday but they'd starve if something else didn't happen soon. He said, "Your material's not bad. Did you write it?" I said, "Yeah." He said, "Can I see more?" And I said, "You bet." I didn't even ask who he was; I mean, I would have shown it to a gardener at this point.

But it was Lorne, and he was combing the clubs looking for writers and actors for this new show. So I went back to Long Island and I stayed up for two days straight and I typed up what I thought were eleven hundred of my best jokes, jokes that I wrote for the Borscht Belt comics, jokes that I practiced writing for other comics, jokes I heard in third grade - I mean, I just went nuts. And so I took my phone book full of jokes and went into the city for my interview with Lorne.

Oh, but first I called Billy Crystal, because he had been talking to Lorne about him being a part of the show from the beginning, either as a cast member or some sort of rotating player. So I said, "Look, I'm supposed to meet with this guy Lorne, can you tell me anything about him?" So Billy told me he used to submit jokes to Woody Allen, he's produced a Monty Python special, and the new show is going to have these little films by Albert Brooks. Oh, and he hates mimes. Lorne hates mimes. So I said fine, I went over to the Plaza Hotel and met with Lorne.

He takes the phone book of jokes, opens it, reads the first joke, and goes, "Uh huh." And closes it. And he says, "How much money do you need to live?" I said, "Well, I'm making $2.75 an hour at the deli - match it." So he said to tell him more about myself. He figured before he'd commit to that kind of money, he wanted to know what he was buying. I said, well, Woody Allen's my idol, I love Monty Python, and maybe my career will go like Albert Brooks's - you know, short films and then bigger ones. "But," I said, "if there's one f.u.c.king mime on the show, I'm outta there." And he gives me the job.

The joke that I had as the number one joke in this compilation of jokes was, just to show you how long ago this was - because of the reference in it - was that the post office was about to issue a stamp commemorating prost.i.tution in the United States. It's a ten-cent stamp, but if you want to lick it, it's a quarter.

We even did it on the show. I remember we were short on jokes. Chevy might have done it. Yeah, I think he did. I think that was my one contribution to the first show, the one that George Carlin hosted.

ROSIE SHUSTER:.

I read Alan Zweibel's book of one-liners that came to the Marmont and discussed it with Lorne. I remember talking a lot about Chevy as a writer. Marilyn Miller we knew from Lily Tomlin. Anne Beatts and Michael O'Donoghue were celebrities, especially O'Donoghue, who was, you know, the darling of the Lampoon, so they came presold. O'Donoghue had a lot of charisma and he was very dark. He was an exciting character in his subversiveness. Al Franken and Tom Davis were a two-for-one kind of bargain bas.e.m.e.nt. They were just starting and anxious to get into the business - you know, let's give them a tryout. I was definitely in the conversations about all that stuff.

ANNE BEATTS:.

I truly think you can say that without Michael O'Donoghue, there wouldn't have been a Sat.u.r.day Night Live, and I think it's important to remember that. I think Lorne would probably be generous enough to acknowledge that. Because I always said Michael was Cardinal Richelieu. He wasn't very good at being the king. He was much better at being either the person plotting revolution or the power behind the throne, telling the king what to do and think. I'm not saying he was manipulating Lorne. It doesn't always have to be about manipulation. It could be about actual helpful guidance.

AL FRANKEN, Writer: Tom Davis and I had known each other since high school in Minnesota. In 1974 we were a comedy team out in L.A. We were the only writers hired by Lorne who he didn't meet. We always thought that if he had met us, we wouldn't have gotten the job. We weren't making money at the time, and the only variety shows around were Johnny Carson's - and we're not joke writers, so we couldn't do that - and Carol Burnett's, which was a good show but not our territory. Oh, and I think Sonny and Cher was on, which was a piece of s.h.i.+t.

Actually, we wrote a perfect submission for Sat.u.r.day Night Live, a package of things we'd like to see on TV - a news parody, commercial parody, and a couple sketches. Basically from that, we were hired. We heard that d.i.c.k Ebersol wanted to hire a team from New York instead of us so he could save on the airfare, but Lorne insisted on us.

Michaels was aghast at the condition of NBC's historic Studio 8H, which despite its n.o.ble traditions was technically primitive and had been allowed to deteriorate. He didn't think it had hosted a weekly live TV show since Your Hit Parade succ.u.mbed to rock and roll and left NBC in 1958.

Meanwhile, NBC bra.s.s were consumed with nervousness about the content of the show - about giving ninety minutes of network time a week to Lorne Michaels and his left-wing loonies. On the first show, with sometimes-racy comic George Carlin hosting, the network planned to use a six-second delay so that anything unexpected and obscene could be edited out by an observer from the Department of Standards and Practices (the censor), who would theoretically flip a switch in the control room and bleep the offending material before it went out naked onto the American airwaves. Over the coming months and years, various hosts or musical acts would make NBC executives more nervous than usual, and the notion of making the show not quite precisely literally live kept coming up.

JANE CURTIN:.

NBC sent me out on a limited publicity tour weeks before we went on the air. I didn't really know what the show was going to be like, but I was the only one in the cast that they weren't afraid of. They knew I wouldn't throw my food.

BERNIE BRILLSTEIN:.

In the first six months, Lorne threatened not to come in to work a lot. He had no way of dealing with these network people. Because Lorne had a vision, and they didn't understand his vision. This was a new show at that time. He made them rebuild the G.o.dd.a.m.n studio, and they didn't understand that. And he made them get great sound in the studio because they were going to have rock acts, and they didn't understand that.

HOWARD Sh.o.r.e:.

What we were going to be doing was really quite technically complicated, but the studio hadn't been kept up to the standards of broadcasting. It was stuck in the late fifties. They hadn't refitted the technology of it over the years. I remember going for that first tour of the studio, and they had game show sets in there and they were doing very low-tech productions in there because it didn't have any of the technology that was really needed to do a live broadcast.

I remember feeling like you were still in Toscanini's studio. It's incredible to think that in the 1950s NBC, this great American broadcast network, hired an Italian conductor and gave him his own orchestra, the NBC Symphony Orchestra, and his own studio and his own elevator for the maestro to get up to the eighth floor. When I asked for a music stand to put my scores on, an old stagehand went back into props and brought out Toscanini's music stand - this huge, black, ornate, five-foot-high carved wooden monstrosity. It came up to about my chin. And they said, "You can put your scores on that." That was the only thing of Toscanini's I'd actually seen. It was wonderful. You felt the history of the place.

BERNIE BRILLSTEIN:.

When Lorne told NBC they had to spend like three hundred grand to rebuild that studio, they nearly had a breakdown.

BARBARA GALLAGHER:.

d.i.c.k Ebersol was really the buffer. He'd worked very hard to get the show on the air. And the NBC guys all thought we were from Mars. The bureaucracy at NBC was terrible. They thought we were a joke at the beginning. Trying to get through the red tape really took a lot of time. We couldn't even get stationery with the show's name printed on it. They clearly thought we were the Lizard People walking around. They had no faith in us at all.

I know Herb Schlosser must have had some faith, though, because d.i.c.k really ran interference for him. Still, we couldn't get anything we needed. It was pulling teeth to get an ounce of money. You get nickel-and-dimed to death, and you build up such an animosity. The network really irked Lorne at the beginning, big-time.

CRAIG KELLEM, a.s.sociate Producer: He was in a constant battle with the network as it pertained to the economics, particularly about the set. Lorne wanted the set to be like almost this architectural prototype. The argument was, "Hey, you can't even see that on camera," and Lorne's att.i.tude was, "Yes, but I want it. I want it anyway."

EUGENE LEE:.

They hired Dave Wilson to be the director. He'd done a lot of TV. Dave was a nice man, but he had very strong opinions about things and said them. And there was a lot of incredible feuding about the layout of the studio. All I remember is, we worked on it and worked on it. Dave and I fought tooth and nail about how it would be laid out. I laid it out my way - longways. There was a lot of muttering about how there wouldn't be enough s.p.a.ce. I said, "The cameras are on wheels, let the cameras roll to the scenery and not the other way."

One day just out of the blue, Lorne comes by and says, "Hey, we've got to go upstairs." And I went with him, and we took the model of the set up to whoever - I think it was Herb Schlosser. We laid it on the coffee table. And Lorne hadn't said much about any of this. But he explained it perfectly to Schlosser. He was like brilliant! I mean really, no kidding. I was knocked out. He said, "This thing goes here, and the camera moves here, and it all stretches around this great big environment." And after that, money didn't seem to be a problem.

DAVE WILSON:.

The idea of having part of the audience sitting around home base was not that new. I'm sure that kind of thing had been done many times. But the idea of putting an audience in front of those side stages was a little different. It worked well because it gave performers more of an intimate feeling of audience, that they were performing not just for cameras but for a live audience.

HOWARD Sh.o.r.e:.

It's true - there is no theme song for Sat.u.r.day Night Live in the traditional sense. This is inherent in the nature of the show. I wanted the theme music for the show to have an improvisational feel, like the show itself, and I wanted it to grow and change from year to year. And that's why when I listen to the show now after twenty-five, twenty-six years, it still sounds fresh to me and sort of cla.s.sic, and it wouldn't have if you kept hearing the same hummable melody over and over. Because the nature of the music on the show was interplay between the ten musicians, which is completely different than what you have in a big band or the Carson sound, which is very formalized arrangements written very specifically, and everybody plays what is written on the page. So with the ten musicians I wanted to create interplay like jazz musicians have amongst themselves, and R&B musicians.

It's the same thing as the cast. You have to think of the musicians in the band the same as you think of the cast and how they would play off each other and kind of riff off each other. That was the same feeling that I wanted to create in the music. So it had to have an improvisational nature. The saxophone was just a thing that I loved, and I am a saxophone player, so it was inherent in my soul that it be the predominant voice. Instead of a band playing a piece with a melody, it was an improvisation by a great blues soloist.

On September 17, 1975, only a few weeks before the first live broadcast of what was then called NBC's Sat.u.r.day Night, Lorne Michaels and several of his cast members got together in a rented midtown studio for forty-five minutes of "screen tests" to see how the performers looked on-camera.

Dan Aykroyd, Laraine Newman, Gilda Radner, Chevy Chase, Garrett Morris, Bill Murray, token older actor George Coe, John Belus.h.i.+, guest Andy Kaufman, and musical director Howard Sh.o.r.e took turns before the camera, most of them improvising material or summoning up routines they'd done in stage shows like the National Lampoon's or at comedy clubs in the United States and Canada.

The tape is a hot underground item but has never been shown on network television, though Michaels considered using parts of it in the fifteenth- and twenty-fifth-anniversary specials. What is Bill Murray doing there? Michaels had hoped to sign him for that first crop of Not Ready for Prime Time Players, but at nearly the last minute he learned from NBC bean counters that the budget would not allow him to hire Murray, at least not now. He instead became a member of the repertory company known as the Prime Time Players on Howard Cosell's short-lived ABC Sat.u.r.day-night variety show.

The tape shows the young performers at the tender and relatively innocent moment before they burst onto the American scene. Aykroyd, leading off, goes through a series of wacky riffs, starting with his recitation of mangled lyrics from the song "Till There Was You" from The Music Man: "'There were birds in the sky, but I never sore [sic] them winging, till there was you.' And 'you,' of course, is the Mas.h.i.+milov UT-1 rocket that Russia has just developed." In a Walter Cronkite voice he reports on "troop movements across the demilitarized zone into North Korea today," then does a mock commercial for "Lloyd Manganaro Deltoid Spray... made from the extracted liquid from the spleens of perfumed sheep." Then he turns into a Louisiana swamp farmer who claims to have been briefly abducted by aliens in business suits: "Now you can believe it if you want to or you can just say that I'm making up this story, but to me it was very, very important, because it killed all the crabs in the area, and my livelihood is threatened, and I'd like somebody to do something about it." Then he a.s.sumes the voice of a man narrating a doc.u.mentary and talks about "shale and the influence of shale on the topography of the world and how shale was superimposed and brought down by the glacial formations." This evolves into a discussion of glaciers, which ends with, "We have a lot of things to thank the glacier for - but who do we write to?"

To offscreen director Dave Wilson in the control booth, Aykroyd asks obligingly, "More characters? More accents? Cleaner look?" But he's dismissed to be replaced in front of the camera by Laraine Newman, who instantly becomes a chirpy and perky airline attendant: "Hi, my name is Sherry and I was made to fly.... When I was first thinking about becoming a stewardess, all my friends were really bugging me. They were coming up to me and saying things like, 'Well, G.o.d, Sherry, why do you want to be a stewardess,' you know? And I had to just sit down with myself and get super-reflective and ask myself, 'Well, gosh, Sherry, why do you want to be a stewardess,' you know? And I really realized that it's because I love people. I really do. I love to serve 'em and try to help 'em fall asleep sitting up, you know?

"Well, the real reason was, I had to get out of the Valley. I'm not kidding, man, it was really getting hairy. My boyfriend, Brad, and I were just falling apart. We had this really nice relations.h.i.+p, we were going to get married and everything, and like, he installed stereo systems and customized fans, you know, and all he ever talked about was woofers and tweeters and push-pull rods, man, and it was really boring. It really grossed me out royal. And my relations.h.i.+p with his parents wasn't too cool either, because I wasn't Jewish, you know, and I, like, made a peach cobbler and I heard them say, 'Well, look. The s.h.i.+ksa made us a Presbyterian pie...."

Bill Murray follows, introducing himself as Was.h.i.+ngton Redskin Dwayne Thomas and saying, "You know, professional football has been good to me." He laments having been sentenced to "one-to-twenty in Texas for possession of herb," then turns into interviewer "Jerry Aldini" and soon is doing an early version of Nick, the awful lounge singer, a character that helped establish him, after some early audience resistance, as a true star on Sat.u.r.day Night Live. First he does a freewheeling version of the show tune "Hey There" from The Pajama Game: "Hey there, you with the starrrrrs in your eyes. n.o.body told you what day it was, n.o.body was surprised." He pantomimes playing a c.o.c.ktail piano, using the desk in front of him as a keyboard, threatening to sing and play "something by Bobby Vinton, something from his new 'Polish Is Cool' alb.u.m...."

Gilda Radner, surprisingly, seems the least at ease in front of the camera. She giggles, looks off toward the wings where Lorne Michaels is standing. "I'm not going to talk about food," Gilda says, "I'm not going to talk about guys...so I don't have anything to say at all." She rambles for a few seconds, then asks, "Wait - can we get an audience in here?" Aykroyd, just out of camera range, tries to help by asking such questions as what Gilda would do "if your period came on right now," then pretends to be Peter Marshall, host of The Hollywood Squares, and poses a question to Gilda: "Is it true that women accelerate more than men on expressway ramps?" Gilda: "Only if they're with a man."

She offers to do her "only character, Colleen," a clueless girl with the same goofy and faraway look no matter what the circ.u.mstances. Thus she looks exactly the same, blank and baffled, as she goes through a brief series of impressions: "This is Colleen at a Nureyev ballet.... This is Colleen going to an Irish festival.... This is Colleen having her first s.e.xual experience." All are the same.

Frustrated and restless, Gilda announces, "Lorne said if I just sat here and stared down the camera, it would take a lot of guts," then asks plaintively, "Can I go now - back to Toronto?" Lorne, off-camera, shouts, "Gilda, that was great."

Chevy Chase, in contrast to Gilda, looks supremely comfortable when he sits down in the chair and starts to talk: "You want me to do something here?" No member of the Not Ready for Prime Time Players, perhaps ever, has been more at home and less inhibited on-camera, ironic considering that Chase originally wanted to be only a writer on the show.

Immediately, Chevy becomes the fatuous anchorman he would immortalize in the "Weekend Update" segment of Sat.u.r.day Night Live. He is holding a few sheets of paper and reads from them - or perhaps simply recites the material from memory: "Our final note concerns the birth of a baby sandpiper at the Was.h.i.+ngton Munic.i.p.al Zoo this morning at 9:13. It's the first such birth in captivity on record. The chick weighed in at just under fourteen grams, and it is said to resemble its mother quite closely.

"A final note of humor: the bird was stepped on and crushed to death by the baby hippo that was born on Wednesday.

"Said zookeeper John Pinkett: 'Well, I guess I'll have to pour kerosene on the mother and light it and hope for the best. Later, perhaps, we can take an electric cattle prod and drive it into the ears of the baby hippo. Or perhaps shove a couple of cherry bombs up its a.s.s, light them, and hope for the best.'

"Well, that's the news this Wednesday. Good night, and have a pleasant tomorrow" - basically the same ending that would be used for "Weekend Update" once the show premiered. Chevy is asked to hold up a few of Edie Baskin's New York photographs so the camera can zoom in on them. Baskin's pictures will be used for a montage under the opening credits of Sat.u.r.day Night Live. Originally those credits featured only images of the city at night and no pictures of cast members.

Jane Curtin, up next, performs what seems for her unusually "sick" material, once she gets a mock commercial for "Jamitol" (Geritol, an iron supplement) out of the way. "In show business, I've had a fairly limited career," she continues. "It's hard to perform on stage in a wheel-chair. However, I entertain a lot of people at my parents' family parties. Having a catheter, a lot of people think, is funny, and they like to see me dance. Thank you."

A voice from the wings asks about what she does "in the privacy of your own home," and Curtin replies, "That's between me and my cat, isn't it?" Murray steps into the frame and begins ma.s.saging her shoulders.

Garrett Morris - who, like Chase, signed on only to be a writer - materializes next. "As I have nothing prepared, I decided I might do some imitations," he says. "The first imitation I will do is of James Mason: 'This is James Mason speaking.'" Morris makes only the most minimal effort to sound anything like James Mason. "That's James Mason. Okay, I'll do another imitation. There's a guy named Cross-eyed Jim that used to live on Federal Avenue in Marble City when I was a kid. Here is Cross-eyed Jim." And he, of course, crosses his eyes. As a "general West Indian," Morris talks about going to the second floor of Barney's and buying clothes from the Johnny Carson Collection.

Aykroyd comes in to feed Morris straight lines, asking him about having spent ten minutes with an unnamed congressman. "He asked me for a joint," Morris says, "and I didn't have any on me. He usually gets a little high.... The indictments against him haven't been proven yet, and I think we should give him the benefit of the doubt."

Aykroyd, changing subjects: "You're the man who saw the first mastodon come across the plains. Am I correct?"

Morris: "Yes, I did, I saw a mastodon. It wasn't across the plains, though. It was in my backyard. And it was sort of noisy....It was three o'clock in the morning, man. I just got in at 2:45 and I needed some rest." Told the mastodon left footprints fifteen feet wide, Morris says, "Jeez, that was a big mother."

John Belus.h.i.+'s turn before the camera that day was brief and very visual. And the instant Belus.h.i.+ sits down, he takes effortless command of the camera. He already has a compellingly "dangerous" look about him. "Okay," he says, "we're going to do some loosening up exercises." He practices doing "takes" and "double takes" and then, as only Belus.h.i.+ could, some "work on the eyebrows." He alternates left and right eyebrows, moving them up and down independently of each other in a series of eyebrow calisthenics.

He s.h.i.+fts gears. "Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Sat.u.r.day Night show. The show is live, the show is not on tape, so all the mistakes you -" He suddenly fakes a horrendous gagging sound, then regains his composure and continues: "So all the mistakes happening on this show are real. We don't plan anything, because everything is real." Now he breaks into a ghastly hacking cough, pretending to spit up into his hands.

"With tape you have the advantage of editing things that don't work. With live television, anything goes." He attempts to attach strips of tissue to his eyelids, using spit to hold them on. Someone calls for an imitation of Marlon Brando and Belus.h.i.+ does part of the taxicab scene from On the Waterfront: "Don't you remember that night in the garden you came down and said, 'Kid, it ain't your night?' Not my night! Charlie, it was you, Charlie." He grabs more tissue, stuffs it in his cheeks, and does Brando in The G.o.dfather, followed by a quick impression of Rod Steiger: "Teddy! Teddy! What're you talking about?! What're you talking ABOUT?! Don't talk to me that WAY!"

Finally, the definitively eccentric comic and performance artist Andy Kaufman, who'll appear on the Sat.u.r.day Night Live premiere (lipsynching to the Mighty Mouse theme), sits in the chair looking incredibly young and bright-eyed, and simply recites the lyrics to "MacArthur Park" in a calm, conversational voice: "Someone left the cake out in the rain. I don't think that I can take it, 'cause it took so long to bake it, and I'll never have that recipe again. Oh, no." He covers his eyes with his hands mournfully.

When he finishes, the voice of director Dave Wilson comes over a loudspeaker: "Andy, could you do that again, please?" "The same way?" "Exactly the same if you can." And he does.

The tape ends with music director Howard Sh.o.r.e, very much the scruffy hippie, modeling a p.i.m.p.i.sh-looking outfit for Lorne, who directs his movements from the wings. The Sat.u.r.day Night Live cast was on the brink of success, poised to revolutionize television, looking fresh, brash, and golden. The premiere was less than a month away - October 11, 1975. A date which will live in comedy.

BRAD GREY, Manager: Bernie was there for the first dress rehearsal. He looked out and he saw the band rehearsing. And it was getting close to starting time. So he turned to Lorne and he said, "Hey, Lorne, you know the band doesn't have their tuxedos on yet. Better get them into wardrobe." That always made me laugh, because it was so honest of Bernie. Tuxedos! And that's sort of, I guess, the merging of two generations.

d.i.c.k EBERSOL:.

Lorne's telling me every day that Chevy's got this great idea to open every show with a fall, and I am absolutely opposed. But Chevy was the only one who was funny and could write television for television.

We were reading scripts in those early days where people would have a three- or four-minute sketch take place on five sets, and it didn't take a real scholar to know you couldn't do that if we were going to do a live television show in a box the size of 8H.

DAVE WILSON:.

Many of them had written for magazines or the National Lampoon Radio Hour or that kind of thing, so it wasn't as if they were brand-new to writing, it's just that they weren't familiar with the medium of television. So of course we'd always go through things where you'd read their script and it says, "We start with a flooded studio." And you'd say, "Well, you better rethink that."

JANE CURTIN:.

Before the show went on the air, we would all have to hang out on the seventeenth floor with the writers and pitch ideas and do all of that kind of stuff, and Lorne would call us all into his office for whatever reason, and he would always end up by telling us what "stars" we were. And I'm thinking, "Hey, we haven't earned it yet," not understanding the machine - the PR and all this stuff that was going to happen and that they were going to make happen. I think Lorne was trying to pump up the arrogance and the adrenaline in the room - which wasn't hard - and I understand now that in order to do that kind of a show or any kind of a comedy show, you have to have arrogance and you have to have adrenaline. And by telling people they're stars, maybe that's one way of doing that.

But sadly, a couple of days later, I think some poor elevator operator was punched because he dared to ask somebody in the cast for an ID. I just kept fighting that kind of thing. I just kept thinking, "No no no no no, it's just a TV show. It'll be okay, and I'm fine."

BILLY CRYSTAL, Cast Member: Three months before the show was supposed to debut, Lorne had found me in a club called Catch a Rising Star. I went, "This is a television producer?" He sounded like David Steinberg the comedian because he was from Canada. He was very appealing, he was very smart, and he was funny in a different way than I envisioned television producers to be. He asked me if I was interested in being a resident in the company. He felt I would do six appearances on the show, and then he saw me becoming a host of the show, among all the other hosts, in two years. They'd be grooming me to be one of the main guys. That's how it came down prior to the show.

BUDDY MORRA, Manager: Billy turned down a Bill Cosby special, who was the hottest thing in the country at that time, to take Sat.u.r.day Night Live, because they said, "If you do the Cosby show, we're not interested in having you do this." And so we opted to do Sat.u.r.day Night Live. We had agreed in advance for Billy to do his special piece on the first show, and that the piece required a certain amount of time; it wouldn't work in less time. So Billy was coming in every day from Long Island, and he just sat around all day long. They never spoke to him, they never got to him, they never said anything to him. He'd leave at the end of the day, after spending eight or nine hours waiting around, and then come back the next morning again. This went on for pretty much the entire week.

BILLY CRYSTAL:.

Then we get to the Friday night. We had a run-through for a live audience and some NBC executives. Now my routine was an audience partic.i.p.ation piece and it utilized Don Pardo and it was this African safari thing with sound effects. I played Victor Mature - it's not going to sound funny - walking across the camp in Africa to knock the tarantula spider off Rita Hayworth's chest. So that was the setup. Don Pardo, who we never saw on camera, had his hands in a big bowl of potato chips, and every time I took a step, Don would crunch the potato chips so it was like this whole sound effects thing. It was really funny on Friday night. And it ran six, six and a half minutes, because it took a long time to explain it. But there were laughs in the explanation and then the piece just sort of went on its own. And Friday night, it was the comedy highlight of the night, and I thought, "I'm in great shape here." George Carlin's hosting this new show and I knew everybody in the show and this is going to be sensational.

Lorne sent in notes after the Friday night run-through and he said to me, "I need two minutes." And I said, "Cut two minutes?" And he said, "No, I need two minutes. All you get is two minutes." So it was a drastic cut in the piece, and frankly as a new performer then I didn't have a little hunk like Andy Kaufman's Mighty Mouse. I didn't have a two-minute thing that I could plug into the show, and I didn't have a stand-up piece that felt like what the show should be that I could have scored in two or three minutes. So we had a big dilemma. And after being involved with Lorne and the show for so long, we were all kind of confused as to what to do. And then when we saw the rundown, they had put me on at five to one. The last five minutes of the show, how can you score? This wasn't what we had talked about. So my representatives said they were going to come in on Sat.u.r.day and talk to Lorne.

BARBARA GALLAGHER:.

Lorne said to me, "We have to cut Billy," after dress rehearsal. "Why don't you go tell Buddy?" I said, "Me? Me tell Buddy? What're you, crazy?" He said, "Yeah, you've got to tell him." Lorne didn't like confrontation. He hated it. So I went and told Buddy. I said, "I think it's a mistake, I know Lorne feels terrible that he has to do this." I said, "Buddy, don't kill the messenger. I love Billy."

LORNE MICHAELS:.